Selected Works

Narrative History

“Perhaps the most intriguing—and dysfunctional—political marriage in history ... a highly engrossing political narrative that skillfully takes the reader through the twisted development of a strange relationship that would help shape America’s foreign and domestic agenda....”—Front Page, The New York Times Book Review

"One of the best books ever written about Richard Nixon"--Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker

"[A] compelling and enlightening account of one of the most important and complicated political relationships in postwar U.S. history.... fascinating"-- The Washington Post

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Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage

A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceOne of the Best Books of 2013: Slate-- Staff PicksOne of Jay Strafford's 10 favorite books of 2013: Richmond Times-DispatchOne of 2013's Best Books: Kansas City StarBooks of the Year: The Spectator (Australia)One of the Eight Best Books for Potus Geeks in 2013

"...an elegant example of how pleasurable political history can be when written by a skilled teller of fictional tales who has a careful reporter's respect for facts. It is top-drawer as political history, unusually well written, and stuffed with forty pages of notes providing sources for an extraordinary variety of information. It is also an entertaining human tale of generational conflict, filled with the elements that enliven popular novels and soap operas."--Russell Baker, in The New York Review of Books.

Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage is narrative history-- an intimate exploration of the nearly twenty-year personal and public relationship between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. The book follows the two men from their first encounter, in the summer of 1950, through Ike's two, crisis-filled presidential terms; it take them to the Vietnam-era, the marriage of Eisenhower's grandson, David, and Nixon's daughter Julie, and Nixon's election just four months before Ike's death. (An epilogue covers the scandals that wrecked Nixon's presidency.) Ike and Dick is based on years of research and fresh interviews with dozens of men and women who knew and worked with both men, including members of the Eisenhower and Nixon families. "To read this book," the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Kennedy wrote, "is to be reminded of Richard Nixon's singularly tortured character in all its cussedness and genius—and to learn anew of Dwight Eisenhower's capacity for shrewd political cunning and often insouciant human coldness."

One early reviewer of Ike and Dick said that my "inner Washingtonian is still intact." That probably comes from being reared there and having worked for a dozen years at the Washington Post, where I was deputy editor of Outlook. For more than thirteen years I was a senior editor at The New Yorker and a contributor to the magazine.

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Ike and Dick is my first extended work of non-fiction. My Washington Trilogy--The Columnist, Bad Publicity, and Trudy Hopedale, novels set in mid-to-late Twentieth Century Washington--was described by Bookforum as "dark, hilarious stories of motion (and stasis) on DC's social ladder." I was also the co-author (with my wife, Diana Crone Frank) of the widely praised The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen: A New Translation From the Danish. I wrote the foreword (based on a New Yorker essay) to the University of Chicago Press's re-issue of the Peter De Vries's dazzling and heartbreaking The Blood of the Lamb.

Ike and Dick is a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the History Book Club. It is also available as an audio book, produced by Tantor Audio and read by the award-winning Arthur Morey.